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IMPORTANT WORDS IN THIS LECTURE ARE RED
Today is July 26, 2011. Yesterday, the political future of the United States of America changed forever. The Democratic Party in the United States has agreed to $2.7 trillion in budget cuts without demanding a penny. Not one single solitary penny of tax increases from the wealthiest people in America, even though taxes are at a 20 year plus low as a percentage of GDP and taxes on the highest incomes are at the lowest level since the postwar period. This is going to have serious consequences. Now let's get beyond the budget numbers and look at some issues that are more important than money. Specifically the issue of life-and-death.
Every major modern state has government national health insurance America alone has millions of people who have no health insurance. Now reputable studies have shown that this produces the death of 45,000 Americans every year. In our view, this is probably an underestimation of the body count, to say nothing of far larger numbers who are maimed and crippled and have their health ruined. This is a morally unacceptable situation. Now Mr. Obama ,while providing trillions in bailouts for the banks and other super rich people, chose not to provide aid for the 50 million uninsured until 2014, after is horrendously complicated and very dubious health care plan kicks in, which is based on America's deeply flawed Medicaid system and forces people to buy insurance from the private insurance companies. Something is very very wrong in America today.
Now this budget deal is a disaster. It is an absolute total and complete disaster. We need to expand government funding in America in a whole series of different ways. Now that's not going to be happening. In this budget deal the whole thing is such a crazy mess it's really hard to begin to even analyze it because this is going to create a legal nightmare for anybody trying to increase any kind of needed government spending; but this is what Obama has produced and this is what the Democratic Party has endorsed. This is going to have - we can't emphasize enough - serious serious consequences. It is not going to work to really deal with America's enormous budget problems. It is going to really screw up plans to invest in the future. So what this does is it is a moral train wreck that is setting the stage for further deep deep problems. Maybe the financial markets could be appeased by it in the near-term but the fact that it isn't going to work is a rather fundamental problem, the amount of money isn't enough so on and so on and so forth. So the larger issue though is the moral issue and the policy issue of what the Democratic Party supposedly stands for and it's also Obama's losing the moral authority and the credibility to lead.
Now this is part of the larger series of problems and we want to shift gears in this discussion briefly look at the global picture. Obama has expanded Bush's campaign of global military imperialism, he hasn't cut it back. Obama has put more American troops in Afghanistan than the Russians did! And those troops are doing very poorly, in fact are doing worse than the Russians did in their war in Afghanistan. This year he started a new war in Libya with some crazy scheme about how he was going to bring democracy to Libya and by preventing humanitarian crisis by having Western imperialist intervention. So far, this has created a humanitarian crisis and backing a bunch of tribal leaders (whoever these people are) and trying to paint them as friends of democracy - it's really difficult to begin to even comment on such a lunatic and also really criminal operation. This is leading to slaughter, this is leading to death and it's not at all clear what it's going to lead to in terms of where this whole mess is going to go.
In the Arab world, Obama's empty promises have been exposed for being empty promises. As a result, Obama is now more hated than Bush in a good part of the Arab world and America's popularity is heading towards record lows below where it was under Bush. In terms of dealing with Israel, it has just been one blunder after another. Obama put forth totally unrealistic proposals in dealing with Israel, demanding an end to the settlements rather than focusing on humanitarian issues in Gaza and other issues. Israel publicly humiliated Obama, made him a laughingstock in front of all world. Meanwhile, Obama and Hillary Clinton have given a series of completely fraudulent speeches, claiming that they were in favor of democracy in places like Egypt and Tunisia, when in fact everybody in the Arab world knows they're not. Does Obama think the Arabs are morons? Apparently his foreign policy advisers do. But this isn't going over big. Now, looking at Obama's complete capitulation to the Republicans in so many issues, another issue looms up very big. That is the desire of a good part of the imperialist faction of the Republican Party to attack Iran.
There are a lot of indications that Israel is planning to bomb Iran sometime in September. Now we can't verify these, maybe they're true, maybe they're not. What we do know is that the political situation in Israel is going farther and farther and farther towards the extreme right and the extreme right in Israel is very tightly connected to right-wing factions in the Democratic Party, right-wing factions in the U.S. Congress, right-wing factions in the Republican Party here. So is the next big capitulation of Obama to go along with the attack on Iran? Now in the Obama foreign policy team frankly is so incompetent it's really hard to tell what may happen here. Certainly there is very little reason to have any confidence in where these people are going. So we go into an election where it's really hard to tell what exactly the Democratic Party in the United States stands for. Its - it's - just not clear and they now have their fingerprints all over a totally immoral and disastrous policy. This is where we stand, this is where we're going and it's it and it's what we've been talking about for years. A deepening crisis in the American system. This is a crisis of the old regime. This is a crisis of the system. America looks more and more like the former Soviet Union. America looks more and more like France before the revolution in 1789. This is a failing system and you should look out below for greater turmoil and look at the long-term changes in politics that we've discussed. This is the end of this lecture.